SOSI Spatial Observation Services & Infrastructure
SOSI is a project for developing innovative “Spatial Observation Services and Infrastructure” within the context of land monitoring initiatives at European and Member State levels. The project’s objective is to demonstrate, in real operations, a decentralised information system allowing integration of distributed data and processing services as well as access and distribution at multiple levels, languages and content granularities.
Video from the SOSI Mit-Term Review:
SOSI is contributing to and maintaining - during a demonstration period - a network of test implementations jointly operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the participating organizations from the European Member States Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Luxembourg.
The programmatic objectives of the European Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) and related user requirements are providing orientation to SOSI. In particular the SEIS activity to implement the Land Cover Data Service (LCDS), a joint initiative of EEA [2008] and twelve Member States to establish an information sharing and reporting environment for land use and land cover change, will be addressed by the SOSI project. It is expected that the results of the SOSI project will contain valuable recommendations for the future evolution of these European services.
The primary technology and operational procedures of SOSI are being implemented by utilizing the Service Support Environment (SSE) of ESA [2007]. SOSI offers a distributed node-based infrastructure of Web-services following Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles and standards thus establishing access to a number of content services and one land cover generation processing service operated by the participating organizations. The SSE infrastructure is providing coupling and user access mechanisms (binding, workflows and portal). The system includes enhanced user management and security features.
Further programmatic facets come into the SOSI project by the fact that the very first operational products of Kopernikus, Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative (former GMES), will be loaded and made accessible via the SOSI infrastructure. The product’s official name is "High resolution core land cover data for built-up areas, including degree of soil sealing, 2006". In this paper the product name is abbreviated FT-ULC, Fast Track Urban Land Cover, because it was generated in the course of the "GMES Fast-Track Service on Land Monitoring" project spearheaded by EEA with coordinated satellite data provisioning by ESA. The SOSI project foresees to implement an operational service to demonstrate online access to these high resolution built-up areas data entirely covering four pilot states namely Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Luxembourg. These land cover data (LC data) will be provided at connected service provision points physically operated in these countries. Potentially more areal coverage can be accessed via the service provision points operated by the EEA node called Land Use Data Centre (LUDC), which will be also interfaced by the SOSI infrastructure.
In the course of analysing the contributions from the mentioned Member States a proposal to tackle also specific national requirements has developed: The Hungarian participation in the information network will, in addition to the land cover service setup in Hungary, address multi-lingual aspects of a national portal for Hungarian users.
This is expected to challenge SSE configuration flexibility in international scenarios. The plans for the SOSI implementation in the Czech Republic (CZ) foresee that an existing Earth Observation (EO) satellite data archive maintained nationally for regionally received Envisat MERIS data shall be connected via SSE drawing benefits from the available tools for publishing archive data, discovery, viewing, ordering via a powerful graphical user interface, and secure delivery of data to users.The SSE capabilities of setting up workflows and value chains of distributed services are a further demonstration objective in SOSI. A custom automated Land Cover (LC) generation engine provided by the company MEEO shall be installed as a network service which can be chained into a SOA workflow. The experimental configuration in SOSI shall orchestrate the retrieval of EO data from the Czech archive service and the flow via this LC generation engine to the Czech LC provider service. It is expected from this demonstration that the value adding process can be managed in a widely automated way, incorporating both synchronous and asynchronous (e.g. for human operator intervention) steps in the processing and provisioning chain, as required. Also the performance and behaviour of the MEEO classification engine shall be assessed.
All in all, it is hoped that the SOSI activity will be convincing that the envisaged SOA approach incorporates a set of viable and efficient tools which can favourably be used for the implementation of “ubiquitous access to distributed, cooperating data and services”, by demonstrating service examples in the EO land monitoring application field.
The current paper gives insight into the current status of the SOSI development and its demonstration activities. It recapitulates the applicable user and system requirements and contains a description of the SOSI architecture specification including information and service viewpoints. It also contains early recommendations and practical lessons learned during the implementation and deployment of the SOSI system.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The project is conducted under contract of the European Space Agency ESA and the strong in-kind steering support by the European Environment Agency EEA. The authors wish to thank Mr. S. D’Elia and Mr. P.G. Marchetti from ESA as well as Mr. C. Steenmans and his LUDC team from EEA for essentially having formed the project idea and for accompanying its execution. The preparedness by the company Geoville to host the Luxembourg SOSI instantiation is very much appreciated. The contributions of the company Spacebel regarding SOA and SSE knowhow and of the company MEEO regarding automated LC generation are very valuable to the SOSI project.
REFERENCES
EEA – European Environment Agency, Shared environmental information system, 2008 http://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/what/shared-environmental-information-system
ESA – European Space Agency, Service Support Environment, 2008 http://services.eoportal.org
G. Triebnig, et al., SOSI - Spatial Observation Services & Infrastructure, paper presented at European conference of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU, TOWARDS eENVIRONMENT - Opportunities of SEIS and SISE: Integrating Environmental Knowledge in Europe, Prague, 27.03.2009 (download paper).
